new template

Since the release of vBulletin 4.0 a few weeks ago, one of the downsides to upgrading is that very few premium themes have been updated to work, leaving many forum owners stuck with using the default theme. For those not into tweaking their own designs the new template system can present a daunting task.

Here’s 22 fresh, clean and simple vBulletin 4.0 themes that, if nothing else, will get your VB4 upgrade a choice of colors and styles. Most can be found at vbulletin.org but I felt these were the ones best suited for use on a board right now. Again, while nothing overly fancy, any should be a good starting point or nice diversion from the default theme.

Well this is news. I got an email from the vBulletin team announcing the official release of the vBulletin 4.x series.

The vBulletin team is very excited to announce the availability of vBulletin 4.0 Gold. The release includes vBulletin 4.0 Forums and the all-new vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite. As of this week, these are officially supported products that are eligible for both ticket support and phone support.

The 4.0 Gold release is the result of huge investments in development resources, rigorous new development and testing procedures, and unprecedented levels of customer input throughout the development process. We’re very grateful for the continued support and passion the vBulletin community has displayed throughout the development process.

Customers can download vBulletin 4.0 from the customer area at https://members.vbulletin.com.

I’ve been playing around with the recent release candidate. It’s ok and is a major change in the development. Some plugins seem to still work, a bunch don’t and none of the templates are compatible. The new template management system has also been redesigned and well, let’s just say it’s quite the different animal. I haven’t used it enough yet to really form an opinion. Everybody can gripe about change and this certainly qualifies so we’ll see.

The forum product looks very promising, as expected, however the CMS suite…. not so much. again, haven’t played with it enough but so far I’m not seeing enough there to convince me to move from a WordPress/vBulletin implementation to the new one, feature wise anyway so there again, we’ll see how it develops.

Should you upgrade? That depends. I haven’t touched either one of my main forums with it yet and don’t really plan to anytime soon. Mainly because I don’t want to use the default theme and I don’t have time to architect a new one at the moment but if you’re game for new and exciting things, then this one is for you.

If you’ve upgraded to 4.0 already, let us know how it went, what you think of it and any problems you might have had.